Thursday, December 29, 2011

This English man memorized the number Pi to thousands of decimal places, his IQ has been measured at around 150, he has demonstrated an ability to perform difficult calculations in his mind in seconds, he has an amazing talent for memorizing huge lists of numbers, names and faces and he can write backwards with ease. His memory has been described as "superhuman". Daniel Tammet? Nup! Taxi driver Tom Morton.

Tammet, Daniel (2006) Born on a blue day: a memoir of Asperger’s and an extraordinary mind. Hodder & Stoughton. 2006.
http://books.google.com.au/books?id=gGrBCQYD3qEC&vq=face&dq=editions:ISBN0340899751&source=gbs_navlinks_s[I think it is interesting that Karen Ammond who is the founder and president of the publicity company KBC Media which Tammet engaged to represent him in 2001 and was also an associate producer of the science-themed “documentary” Brainman (released in 2005), which brought Tammet to the attention of some British neuroscience researchers and launched him into fame as a celebrity neuropsychiatry case, is thanked by name in the acknowledgements section of the US 2007 Free Press edition of this book, but was not mentioned in the acknowledgements in the 2006 UK Hodder and Stoughton first edition. Ammond’s acknowledgement in the US edition is separate to Tammet’s acknowledgement of people described as the “team behind the Brainman documentary”. Is Ammond’s full role in Tammet’s career a sensitive subject?]

Treffert, Darold A. (2006) Extraordinary people: understanding savant syndrome. Backinprint.com, February 14th 2006.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/059509239X/ref=rdr_ext_tmb[A brief outline of Tammet’s life story can be found in the epilogue in this 2006 edition]

Ward, Jamie (2008) The frog who croaked blue: synesthesia and the mixing of the senses. Routledge, 2008.
[Author a UK synaesthesia researcher. Dr Ward has communicated directly with Tammet, but his writing about Tammet in this book is not an interview format, and it appears that the quotes and material from Tammet in this book are excerpts from Tammet’s first book. Amongst his discussion of Tammet Dr Ward explains that extraordinary memory feats can be performed with the use of the method of loci, and it is clear from the details in this paragraph that Ward has read the “Routes to Remembering” study by Maguire, Valentine, Wilding and Kapur but disappointingly Dr Ward shows no awareness that Tammet was one of the subjects of that study (Ward 2008 p.113), and Ward shows no scepticism about Tammet’s self-account. Ward states that “...Daniel Tammet broke the European record for reciting 22,514 digits of pi without error...” (Ward 2008 p.110). One person has claimed this is untrue. Another quote from Ward's book: “As with other people with autism, he is little interested in faces and he believes that his memory for faces is poor.” Had Ward known that Tammet was one of the subjects tested for face memory in the "Routes to Remebering" study, and had performed brilliantly in a World Memory Championship competition in 2000 in a task titled "names and faces" Ward might have been sceptical about Tammet's claims of a deficit in face memory.]

Murray, Stuart (2008) Representing autism: culture, narrative, fascination. Liverpool University Press, 15/07/2008
http://books.google.com.au/books?id=dkSIEzPYQM4C&dq=tammet&source=gbs_navlinks_s[Tammet is discussed over a number of pages. Although Murray does not question the truth of Tammet’s autobiographical story, he does compare representations of Tammet in the Brainman “documentary” and Tammet’s first autobiography with fictional representations of autism in the movie Rain Man and the novel by Mark Haddon The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time “For all Tammet’s achievements, it is the backdrop of fiction, and the expectations produced by such fiction, that appears as his immediate context.” (p.92)]

Tammet, Daniel (2009) Embracing the wide sky: a tour across the horizons of the mind. Free Press, January 2009.
http://books.google.com.au/books?id=E3fkLVpsb1wC&dq=%22daniel+tammet%22+face+recognition&source=gbs_navlinks_s[The title of the German version of this book translates as “Clouds springer: from a genius autistic learning”. This book is a wide-ranging and light discussion of various areas of psychology, with some autobiographical info. On pages 73–74 of the Hodder & Stoughton edition Tammet explains in detail how memorization using chunking and a hierarchical structure is done, while also claiming that his mind does this spontaneously. On page 40 Tammet wrote that his IQ score was found to be 150 in testing by "a qualified educational psychologist" which he undertook as a part of his own inquiry into IQ testing, Tammet claiming this was the first time he had done an IQ test. Tammet's claims in this book are not consistent with information known about Tammet. In 2002 Tammet was one of the World Memory Championship (WMC) participants who volunteered as subjects in the “Routes to Remembering” study by Maguire et al, which had various tests of cognition as a part of the study. A quote from pages 90-91 of that study: "The superior memorizers were not exceptional in their performance on tests of general cognitive ability..." It is hard to imagine how an individual capable on attaining an IQ score of 150 could have gone unnoticed in this study of only ten superior memorizers and ten matched normal controls. Face recognition was also tested in this study, the WMC competitors as a group performing slightly better than controls and I found no note of any face recognition difficulties in any of the participants in this study, which conflicts with Tammet's assertion on page 61 of his book Embracing the Wide Sky that he has "great difficulty remembering faces". A possible explanation for this contradiction is that the test used in the study might be open to the use of non-face features for identification, thus possibly failing to identify prosopagnosia. Tammet has claimed to have synaesthesia in both of his books and it is generally accepted by media people that Tammet is a synesthete, but there is nothing in the "Routes to Remembering" study to indicate that any of the study subjects had synaesthesia, but we don't know if it would necessarily have been picked up by those investigators. Tammet does appear to have mentioned in the study having epilepsy as a child, as this is noted in the study.]

Treffert, Darold A. (2010) Islands of genius: the bountiful mind of the autistic, acquired, and sudden savant. Jessica Kingsley, 2010.
[Has a foreword by Daniel Tammet. Many famous and well-known autistic savants are written about and Tammet is included as one of this group. A surprisingly vacuous book, given the interesting subject matter. Clearly written for a popular and not professional or academic readership.]

Smith, Neil, Tsimpli, Ianthi, Morgan, Gary and Woll, Bencie (2011) The Signs of a Savant: Language Against the Odds. Cambridge University Press, 2011.
http://books.google.com.au/books?id=3PgyeypNqzYC&vq=tammet&dq=tammet+daniel&source=gbs_navlinks_s[Tammet has been the subject of studies by some of the authors of this book. Discussion of Tammet can be found on p.151-2 “...we tested him on a variety of spoken languages...”, “He is reasonably fluent in Lithuanian, Spanish, Romanian, Esperanto and Welsh; he has some knowledge of French and German;...” It is interesting that Tammet is described as only having “some knowledge” of French and German considering that Tammet reported getting A grades in both languages in his GCSE in Born on a Blue Day (p.107 Free Press/Simon and Schuster ed, p.117 in Hodder and Stoughton ed), and Tammet promotes his own online language courses in French and Spanish from his own website Optimnem, and was reported in 2009 to have learned German in a week (Bethge 2009). In this book Tammet’s learning of British Sign Language was studied and compared with the disabled language savant Christopher, and was found to be different in some respects. Tammet's account of his participation in research studies with authors of this book can be found on pages 167 and 221 of the Simon and Schuster/Free Press 2007 edition of Born on a Blue Day, or on pages 181 and 237 of the 2006 Hodder and Stoughton edition.]

Baron-Cohen, Simon (2011) Zero Degrees of Empathy: A New Theory of Human Cruelty. Allen Lane, April 2011.
[Tammet is discussed on two pages of this bizarrely ill-conceived book by the Cambridge professor who initially gave Tammet’s legend credibility with some other scientists by describing Tammet in two journal papers. This book begins on a very strange note by presenting a medically impossible urban legend as a factual anecdote.]

Baron-Cohen, Simon (2011) The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty. Basic Books, May 31, 2011.
[The US version of Zero Degrees of Empathy. Tammet is discussed on two pages of this bizarrely ill-conceived book by the Cambridge professor who initially gave Tammet’s legend credibility with some other scientists by describing Tammet in two journal papers. This book begins on a very strange note by presenting a medically impossible urban legend as a factual anecdote.]

Seaberg, Maureen (2011) Tasting the universe: people who see colors in words and rainbows in symphonies: a spiritual and scientific exploration of synesthesia. New Page Books, 2011.
http://www.tastingtheuniverse.com/[Author an American synaesthete journalist with an interest in spirituality. Many famous synaesthetes discussed and/or interviewed including Daniel Tammet, who is interviewed and given a completely uncritical and unsceptical treatment. Seaberg breathlessly described Tammet as “another living genius, synesthete savant Daniel Tammet” (Seaberg 2011 p.252). Seaberg makes a hash of reporting Tammet’s supposed Pi record “...he was famously able to memorise the number Pi to 22,500 places-and even more in recent times” (Seaberg 2011 p.158). Two different Pi record attempts by Tammet? He stopped at 22,500 decimal places? I don’t think so. Seaberg gives one of a few recent reports of Tammet working on writing fiction (Seaberg 2011 166-167).]

Foer, Joshua (2011) Moonwalking with Einstein: the art and science of remembering everything. Allen Lane/Penguin, 2011.
[includes a chapter about Tammet in which Tammet’s achievements in the World Memory Championship under his original name of Daniel Corney in 1999 and 2000 are discussed, Tammet’s synaesthesia and savantism are questioned and the author considers whether Tammet’s remarkable talents are best explained as the result of training]

......and a different list of some books about synaesthesia and/or neuropsychology that appear to be Tammet-free

Van Campen, Cretien (2007) The Hidden Sense: synesthesia in art and science. The MIT Press; 1 edition, October 31, 2007.
[I could find no references to Tammet in this book’s index and a partial search by Google Books]

Something must be done now to stop what is happening. Please take action!

"Data from the National Core Indicators project, a national database run by the Human Services Research Institute and the National Association of State Directors of Developmental Disability Services, shows that the percentage of people with developmental disabilities receiving psychotropic medications is much higher than the percentage who have the co-occurring mental health conditions that might justify their use. The long term side effects of such inappropriate medication include obesity, diabetes, long term brain damage, injury, and even death."

"I saw people being medicated to control behavior to such a degree that to me it was obviously and clearly affecting their health, their safety, their quality of life, their ability to participate in the daily activities of living, and in some cases threatened their lives"

"And even the use of the drugs to control behavior is questionable. A 2008 study published in the medical journal The Lancet found that psychotropic drugs like Risperdal were less effective at treating behavioral outbursts than placebos."

"Ms. Vargha protested after her sister, 47, was given as much as 360 milligrams per day; the maximum dosage recommended by the Food and Drug Administration is 160 milligrams."

"At the same time, state officials conceded in records obtained by The Times that they did not really know what her diagnosis was; assessing her has been complicated by the fact that Ms. Vargha’s sister is far more fluent in Persian than English."

No proper assessment and no clear diagnosis but regardless this poor woman was put on an elephant's dose of one of those horrendous neuroleptic anti-psychotic drugs? I'd be shocked if this happened in some busted-arse backwater of country, so I'm completely at a loss to understand how such deplorably low standards of medical and social care can be tolerated in the United States of America.

"....people with developmental disabilities in group homes in New York are more likely to be given Ativan, an anti-anxiety drug that also serves as a tranquilizer, than multivitamins."

"... records examined by The Times show that some developmentally disabled residents received psychotropic drugs without ever getting a clear diagnosis of mental illness. Even among those who have a mental illness, the records indicate that the state’s use of the drugs can be overly aggressive."

Monday, December 26, 2011

According to his own account, Daniel Tammet changed his original surname of Corney to Tammet because he did not like his original surname while he did like the surname Tammet, which apparently has a meaning in Estonian that Daniel liked. I find it interesting that the surname "Tammet" is a name that was once assumed by an Estonian man who liked to change his name and make improbable claims. I've got to wonder, had Daniel been reading about impostors around the time that he chose his new surname?

Sunday, December 25, 2011

"I did have a very restricted, regimented life," he says. "There was a kind of happiness there, a contentment, but it was a small happiness within very clear and delineated borders. I did eventually grow out of these, and part of that was due to the success of the book. I had to travel, meet journalists, give speeches and in that process I shed some of that remaining awkwardness, developed confidence and other skills. It was a very positive chance that I was given to open myself up to do that."

But Daniel Tammet did so many things and achieved so much in the years leading up to the 2006 publication of his first book! Can he really say that he led a very restricted life, presumably due to being autistic, when in 1999 he first competed in the World Memory Championships, and in the year 2000 attained a ranking of fourth in the world? Then in 2002 Tammet volunteered to be the subject of serious scientific study by researchers from three different universities, a study which was published in a major science journal. Sounds like a pretty exciting and interesting life, to be honest. And if Tammet was so restricted and content with his secluded, quiet life, why did he in the year 2001 approach a major PR company with the aim of becoming famous? That's a contradiction, if ever there was one! And before the writing of his first book Tammet, by his own account, travelled overseas to work as an ESL teacher a place where English was a second language, and at some point he started his own online teaching business, two achievements that showed an outgoing drive to succeed, which is in many ways admirable.

No, it's very clear that the impression that Tammet gave that his life before his first book hit the shelves was restricted and uneventful, and that he was at the time content with such a life, is complete rubbish. A reading of Tammet's first book alone would have cast doubt on that notion, and this is something that any journalist interviewing a writer promoting their second book should have done. But this is only the tip of the iceberg of events in Tammet's life that journalist Susan Mansfield never bothered to research or discover or report. Her 2009 article about Daniel Tammet which was published in The Scotsman was a sycophantic and sloppy piece of crap, but sadly also typical of the press and electronic media coverage of Tammet throughout his career. Shame, journalists, shame!

Monday, December 19, 2011

If you think that a heightened level of awareness of mental illness, with the successful selling of the idea that it can affect anyone anytime can only be a good thing, consider the hazards of living in a world in which everyone is considered insane till proven otherwise - a murder can be written off by police as a suicide even in the absence of any existing diagnosis or warning signs, doctors working in under-resourced hospitals can send cases that look like mental illness off to the psychiatry department as a first response instead of spending time and resources investigating the problem as a physical illness, difficult children, neglected children and kids with special needs can be diagnosed as having a mental illness and medicated into an inert state, accidental or negligent deaths can be wrongly explained as the work of a unhinged mind and not properly investigated, legitimate complaints of all kinds and all situations can be dismissed as nothing more than a paranoid personality at work, and you or I or someone you know could be accused of doing any manner of batshit insane thing if it suits the interests of employers, family, police, the government, insurance companies or any agent who has to come up with an explanation for some situation.

The grand theory of autism, the "extreme male brain" theory of autism, which has been championed and popularized by Professor Simon Baron-Cohen and his team at the Autism Research Centre of the University of Cambridge, asserts that autism is characterized by relative gifts in a set of abilities and interests labelled as "systemizing", and relative disability in a set of abilities and interests labelled as "empathizing". This theory also asserts that males are, as a group, naturally more talented at systemizing and less naturally talented in empathizing than females, male psychology being something like a mid-point between the autistic and females. It is hard to find a place for female autistics within this theoretical model, so lets just say that within the world described by this model, they (we?) are complete freaks. The biological mechanism proposed as an explanation in this model is the action of testosterone on the developing brain of a foetus or infant.

This model has implications way beyond the search for a scientific explanation for autism - this theory also tells us that the behaviour of males and females should and does generally differ due to biological factors, and the logical consequence of taking this theory seriously must be a degree of caution about taking steps to counter gender differences in participation in various aspects of life, and a greater tolerance of what appears to be a gender stereotyped world in which men and women generally take on different sets of roles. Mathematics is categorized by Baron-Cohen and co-researchers as an area of human endeavour that requires talent in systemizing but makes virtually no demands on empathizing. It has been cited as an ideal career or study choice for intelligent autistics for this reason, and the logical extension of this thinking is that males should have a greater natural talent for maths than females. This idea is also congruent with popular beliefs. A controversy broke out this year over the marketing of a T-shirt with the slogan "I'm too pretty to do math". Presumbly the idiots who are selling this garment believe the idea has enough currency to find some kind of market for this product. Baron-Cohen's team take the supposed similarity between being a mathematician and being autistic so far that they are doing a whole genome study of mathematicians versus non-mathematicians, mirroring the type of genetic research this is typically done studying the genes of autistics. They hope to compare the genes of mathematicians and people diagnosed with Asperger syndrome to see if there are similarites or differences.

Baron-Cohen's model of maths and testosterone relies on a number of assertions to be found to be true in the world of real people and real achievements. If it is found that there are no significant differences between the genes of mathematicians and a comparable non-mathematician control group, or that there are no unique genetic similarities between the mathematical and the autistic, or that there is no evidence of innate difference between mathematical talent between males and females, then the wings will fall off of this model and it shouldn't fly anywhere. I've been busy this year exploring the absurdity and failure of many of the ideas that have been promoted by Baron-Cohen, and here's another one. A newly published study of participation and achievement in mathematics of boys and girls in a large and varied range of countries has found that quite contrary to the idea that it is a waste of time encouraging girls to achieve in maths due to an innate feminine lack of systemizing potential, it is actually true that the performance of both boys and girls in maths increases with greater gender equity, and my reading of the study's findings is that in many counties, in single and in mixed-sex schools, girls are actually out-performing boys anyway. The idea that testosterone acting on the brain bestows an additional quantity of units of some mysterious source of mathematical or systemizing talent looks like just one more garbage idea to come out of Cambridge. It's time to put out the rubbish, because the trash is really on the nose.

Some quotes from the research paper by Kane and Mertz:

"In summary, we conclude that gender equity and other sociocultural factors, not national income, school type, or religion per se, are the primary determinants of mathematics performance at all levels for both boys and girls."

"Eliminating gender discrimination in pay and employment opportunities could be part of a win-win formula for producing an adequate supply of future workers with high-level competence in mathematics. Wealthy countries that fail to provide gender equity in employment are at risk of producing too few citizens of either gender with the skills necessary to compete successfully in a knowledge-based economy driven by science and technology."

Wealthy countries that fail to provide gender equity? I think they are talking about you, Australia!

Monday, December 12, 2011

Don't you just hate it when you are visiting your grandmother in her home, and you're making yourself a cuppa, and you dig a teaspoon out of nanna's cutlery drawer, and it's pretty-much covered in a hardened layer of dried egg yolk from a breakfast boiled egg, and you return to the drawer in the hope of more luck, and there you go, there's a whole collection of egg-glazed teaspoons in there. Stone the crows, Nanna!

Donna Williams is a high-profile Australian best-selling author of autobiographies about what is supposedly an autistic life. She was given a diagnosis of autism by the Australian clinician Dr Lawrence (Laurie) Bartak in her 20s. This is how Dr Bartak described Williams in a report broadcast by ABC radio in 1996:

"She is much more impaired in spoken language, and when one talks with her even now, although she's enormously more able, she still has quite a demonstrable impairment in spoken language. And her comprehension of other people's speech is not marvellous.I've had to, for example, talk to her slowly and with as little intonation as possible, for her to be able to comprehend and to keep things reasonably concrete."

There's quite a contrast between the woman described by Bartak and Donna's current apparently excellent ability to make and comprehend spoken language, as is apparent when one listens to her library of podcast interviews with various people, which is freely accessible from Williams' podcast page. Williams is articulate, attentive to her guests, intimate, engaging and warm, and at times shares jokes. I've met autistics who never go anywhere near to having this type of social fluency at any time in their long lives. In the interview with a synaesthete musician promoting a new CD Williams and her guest even manage to keep a perky interview kicking along despite the constant distraction of a tradesman banging away with tools in the background, a situation that would drive many autistics (and many non-autistics) beyond the limits of civility.

Williams' page of podcasts includes an interview with Australian synaesthete musician Tracey Roberts in which both Williams and Roberts describe their own synesthesia experiences. Roberts lives in a geodesic dome, as do all synaesthetes. We are very creative people.

"The label schizophrenia is still with us, but hopefully not for too much longer. It is a tired, old concept that has outlived much of its usefulness. There is not one schizophrenia: more likely a hundred causes will gradually be teased out as research goes beyond description and discovers fundamental explanations."

I would argue that this statement applies as much to autism/the autistic spectrum as it does to schizophrenia.

"People mistakenly think that naming a psychiatric problem shapes it into a simple disease with a reductionist, biological explanation."

This is a quote from a review by Dr Allen Frances of the book American Madness by Richard Noll, which has just been published in New Scientist magazine. Unfortunately much of the book review is behind a paywall. Dr Allen Frances is an Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry and was the chair of the task force in charge of DSM 4, an edition of the "bible" of American psychiatry. The book that Frances reviewed is about the evolution of the diagnostic concept of schizophrenia, a concept that is very relevant to the many articles and discussions in my blog about two interesting subjects: Jani Schofield and the ambitions of Prof. Patrick McGorry. Dr Frances has been one of the most outspoken and influential critics of the mental health policies for Australia that have been advocated by Prof. McGorry.

Thursday, December 08, 2011

This is a video of David, who had a brain hemorrhage resulting in a number of problems including acquired prosopagnosia (face-blindness) and a problem with "route finding" or navigating. In this video David tries and struggles to explain what it is that he sees when he views faces. He has lost the ability to remember faces as a result of his brain injury.

The thing that I find most interesting about this video is when David explains that his disability in perceiving faces and another problem with visual perception has resulted in an aversion to being among crowds, and also difficulty with dealing with visually crowded places such as a very full refrigerator or a shop full of displayed goods. He describes this as a "dyslexia of vision". Because David has acquired prosopagnosia he can tell that this problem with crowds is due to his brain injury. Before the hemorrhage he used to love crowded places. People who have been labelled as autistic and parents of kids diagnosed as autistic often describe being unable to cope with crowds and supermarkets as a behavioural characteristic of autism. David's experience appears to indicate that a difficulty with coping with visually crowded places could have prosopagnosia, possibly in combination with other visual processing issues, as a cause, and in light of the fact that prosopagnosia (acquired and developmental) is thought to be a fairly common and under-diagnosed disability, I've got to wonder how many of these supposedly autistic people who can't tolerate crowds and supermarkets have disabilities that are really sensory and social problems caused by unidentified prosopagnosia or caused by some kind of unidentified visual processing disorder.

Another aspect of prosopagnosia which could easily be mistaken for autism is a coping strategy that people without face memory typically use - memorizing many different details of a person's appearance for identification. For example, a person who cannot recognize faces might pay close attention to the design or colours on the shirt of a person who the prosopagnosic needs to remember, and also try to remember if that person wore glasses, or what their hair was like. An enhanced attention to details, including visual details, is a universally recognized feature of autism/Asperger syndrome, and it is easy to see how the detail-memorizing coping strategy of prosopagnosics could be misinterpreted as a special autistic gift for attending to details.

I think it's a very good thing that we can view David giving a first-hand explanation of his experiences and perceptions, rather than having to rely on an interpretation from a doctor or a researcher. Thank you David for sharing!

You can't say that the Australian government lacks sensitivity - the deportation of two Sri Lankan asylum seekers has been scheduled for December the 12th and 13th because the 10th is Human Rights Day, and we must observe human rights on Human Rights Day.

Tuesday, December 06, 2011

"There is no cure for synaesthesia, but next year's UK Synaesthesia Association conference will include a speaker who claims to be able to reduce its effects."

WHAT? A cure for synaesthesia? What? Oh, f*** off. Why does a bit of colour in music and the alphabet require an intervention? I like my synaesthesia, and I suspect that there's a lot more to it than atypical sensory experiences. I don't want to "reduce its effects", in fact I'd be afraid to try such a thing. FYI synesthesia is not "a medical condition". It is a neuropsychological variation. It is not diagnosed by doctors, it is identified by researchers. The journalist who wrote this inappropriate application of the standard cliches of journalistic treatment of medical topics in a way that has inadvertently caused objection and offense has no excuse at all for her mistaken approach, as she has herself quoted in her article a synaesthesia researcher who advised that she has "met very few synaesthetes who feel that" synaesthesia is a thing that one would consult a doctor about, but the heedless journalist Laura Barnett just ploughed on.

When I look back and recall weddings that I've been to over the years, of some marriages that didn't last, but the absence of an official ceremony for some gay and lesbian relationships which turned out to be no less substantial, I think it's a sad thing. We can never be sure what the future will be like, and our plans may fail in time, but we must all be allowed to live our lives, fully.

If the date given for this recording of June 18th 1995 is correct, Tammet would have been around 16 years at the time, and he would have been Daniel Corney. I believe the person who uploaded it was a childhood friend of Tammet's, who appears to have a non-British heritage. There are many questions and doubts about Daniel Tammet's past and his characteristics, but we can be sure that he was never just your average Joe. Perhaps this video is evidence that a desire to become famous had an early origin.

Friday, December 02, 2011

Tonight SBS Two will be broadcasting a documentary titled "Looking for Lowry" about the UK artist L. S. Lowry, who is one of the many famous people in my huge list of famous people who have been the subject of diagnosis or speculation regarding the autistic spectrum. "Those who knew and appreciated him throw light on the character of this social recluse, who despite his solitary life, was affectionate and supportive to those who entered his limited sphere."http://www.sbs.com.au/schedule/SBSTWO#eveningNot so long ago there was another documentary broadcast on Aussie TV about another famous loner artist who is in both of my big lists - the one about famous people and autism/Asperger syndrome, and also my big list of famous synaesthetes or possible synesthetes. The subject of this fascinting doco is Piet Mondrian, who was most famous for his bold geometric paintings featuring a limited rage of colours including black, white, blue, red and yellow, but he did much more besides. Mondrian hated the colour green, and it was with great reluctance that he created a few marketable paintings of flowers during the very lean times when his ground-breaking geometrical paintings would not sell. The title of that French documentary is "In Mondrian's Studio" and it's certainly worth a look if it is ever repeated. http://sales.arte.tv/detailFiche.action?programId=2464

S. It is remarkable. I am curious though, if you actually tried the calculation pi, could you actually do the calculation at all in your head to any digits?D. I've never tried the calculation. I am not actually aware of the equations mathematicians use.

Last month New Scientist magazine published a feature article with an accompanying editorial that included speculation that genes associated with autism could have played a pivotal role in human evolution, which I like as an idea even if I'm not convinced by the evidence cited to support it. The bits that I don't like are the way this idea about autism is presented side-by-side with similar arguments about disorders and mental illnesses such as bipolar, schizophrenia and ADHD, and the way they put this article behind a paywall. Sigh.

I'm still trying to figure this one out. J. K. Rowling and other celebrities have complained at a recent inquiry in the UK that they have been stalked by the press and had their privacy invaded, while Daniel Tammet has apparently had a dream run with the world's press and electronic media, including the same hard-arsed British media industry that the other celebrities have recently been complaining about bitterly. All these years Tammet has been sitting on the fact that Tammet was not his real surname up until 2001, and I don't even think it was a journalist who revealed to the world what his original surname was. And the name change is just the tip of the iceberg of the untold story of Daniel Tammet.

In 2005 one journo with the much over-rated newspaper the Guardian wrote a piece on Tammet which was totally lacking in any skeptical view except that it revealed the fact that his name had been changed, but the journalist kindly did not reveal Tammet's original surname of Corney, citing a desire for privacy on Tammet's part, and thus failing to give the readers of the Guardian the key that could unlock the significance of the publicly-available World Memory Championship records of Tammet's pre-2001 achievements. Tammet apparently made veiled references at his own blog to his participation in a "Memory Olympics", but without knowing what surname he did this under this information cannot be easily verified or researched.

The almost uniformly breathlessly sycophantic promotional tripe that has been written and broadcast about Daniel Tammet by the world's journalists over many years, contrasting with the invasive and obnoxious treatment that many other famous people have received from the media over the years begs the question - why has Daniel Tammet been such a sacred cow?

Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Many years ago in western democracies such as Australia, the UK and the United States of America the idea that a child's path in life should be determined by their gender was generally rejected, but in the last few years I have found many ways in which this idea has in practice, if not explicitly, returned to legitimacy in Australia and around the developed world, and has also become a popular fad embraced my many Australians. Much of this article was written in 2013 but it has been added to over the years and remains just as relevant in 2016.In Australia we have gender segregation in........Baby namesAn obvious form of gender differentiation but not inevitable, as unisex first names such as Ashley or Jesse are not a new concept. Girl’s names are more likely to end in a vowel sound and surnames used as first names appear to be more common with boy’s names.

Baby clothes
We are all familiar with the blue and pink cliché.

Skirts and dresses for toddler and baby girls are easy to find in the shops, even though such garments can be a hazard that can trip-up or impede an active crawling, climbing or toddling infant. This must surely restrict the physical activity of toddler girls to some degree.

Schools
Many private schools have always been for boys or girls only, and some private schools have become co-ed, but the idea of singe-sex education has made some inroads into government school education in Australia. In November 2015 a Western Australian newspaper reported on a boys-only kindergarten class that appears to be in the state school systemhttps://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/wa/a/30216523/new-kindy-boys-in-a-class-of-their-own/?cmp=st&cmp=st
The teacher of that class cited "research" to back up her apparent beliefs that boys are different in terms of activity levels, noise and "mathematical reasoning and spatial awareness". The "parenting expert" Maggie Dent endorsed these ideas.

Schoolyard play?
A recent study of Australian childrens' play in schoolyards by Kate Darian-Smith and Nikki Henningham has found that "No formal gender segregation was observed in the playground in Australian government and non-government coeducational schools", but what about informal gender segregation? It appears that the report did not directly address this question, even though a fair number of the photos in the report showed single-sex groups of kids playing together. A possible negative impact of girls' traditional school uniforms on their play was observed: "In all schools many schools (sic) girls preferred to wear shorts, including under dresses, so as to be more able to participate in physical play." Co-educational play possibly broadens the play options of all: "A teacher at the all-boys school noted with interest that when girls are involved with holiday programs, skipping and clapping rhymes become evident..."

Youth clubs
Many youth clubs and movements, including church and religion-based youth groups, started out long ago as single-sex organizations, and some remain so. The Boy Scout movement started as a male-only organization, and the Girl Guides developed as a parallel to cater for girls who wanted to participate in similar activities. As with some adult service clubs, gender segregation has remained in the female version of the organization but not in the male one. According to the Wikipedia “Even when most Scout organisations became coeducational, Guiding remained separate in many countries to provide a female-centred programme.”

Of possibly more concern is the trend for local government-funded programs for youths to be single-sex, with promotional material that makes heavy use of gender stereotyping. One example is a girls-only after-school drop-in program featuring cooking, health workshops, wellbeing workshops, life skill development and unspecified "outings". It all sounds very cheap to run and limiting for participants. The flyer promoting the program was decorated with pink, mauve and pale blue flowers and paisley swirls. Ick.

Recreational facilities

Australian public skate parks tend to have a heavy male bias in the gender ratio of users, who tend to be children and youths. I have found that the higher the quality of the skate park, the more likely one is to find young children, parental supervision and girls at the skate park, but nevertheless the normal situation is that there are no females at all using a skate park at most times of the day, and there do not appear to be any initiatives by the municipal city councils who own these skate parks to promote their use to girls or the parents of girls, despite the fact that social research has established that as girls move into puberty their participation in sport often declines.

High school chaplain-delivered programmes for students
Single-sex programs offered by high school chaplains in Australian government schools include programs that go by the names Strength and Shine and Bloke and Chick, which makes me want to puke and chuck. Apparently the Strength and Shine programs are the products of the powerful fundamentalist Hillsong church.

Religion-required sex segregation
There are too many examples to attempt to list. Some particularly striking examples include sex segregation in Islam and in some Islamic societies, and also in Orthodox Judaism. FaceGlat is an Israel-based and sex segregated version of Facebook.

Government-funded employment agencies
I know of at least one employment service provider which appears to have a blanket policy of directing job seekers who are the primary care-givers of young children into stereotypically feminine jobs, and the majority of primary care-givers of children just happen to be female. I believe the justification given for this practice is the incorrect idea that these are the only jobs that offer family-friendly hours.

In Australia jobs are sometimes advertised as requiring applicants of one gender, which I thought was illegal, at least in the past, and I know from first-hand observations that some government-funded job service providers will go along with this sexism while matching clients to such jobs.

Government-funded career choice counselling
One Australian state government-funded career counselling service offers a workshop in which participants do a questionnaire based on John Holland's theory about interests and career choice (RIASEC), and while I can't identify anything gender-biased about the tool itself, the illustration about people working in careers that was used in the presentation and in printed material did appear to be a depiction of gender stereotypes or gender biases. The two areas of interests that are the most about dealing with people, the "social" and the "enterprising" interest categories were illustrated with female models, while the other interest categories of "realistic", "investigative", "artistic" and "conventional" are illustrated by male models. Just by the numbers alone this illustration is gender-biased with more males shown than females. An image search on Google did not yield any links to this particular illustration that I could share here, but this search did retrieve many illustrations of the Holland Codes from American sources, and I could not identify any gender biased examples among the US-sourced career counselling material. I did find one American illustration that very much went against gender stereotypes from a university in Maryland in which was the gender-opposite to the Australian illustration except that the "investigative" as also male. So it appears that Australia has a particular problem with gender stereotyping in government-funded career services.

In 2013 child-care workers in Australia were paid $19 an hour. This workforce is overwhelmingly female and many of them have educational qualifications. This is a disgrace.

I have worked for one of Australia's largest corporations and I have been told by an apparently surprised or puzzled supervisor to stop working at a task among male employees and go work at a different task because "The girls are out the back". During training this same supervisor told me and other trainees that she believed that female employees had a natural advantage at a particular type of work. At another work-site I had a male employer who made jokes about supposed psychological differences between men and women often during tea-breaks. This work supervisor was completely open about assigning workers to specific tasks according to gender. At both work sites there was obvious sorting by gender in allocation of workers to various tasks.

Eating and drinking
According to the stereotypes, women and girls like to eat chocolate, thickly-iced cupcakes and similar sugary junk food as a form of psychological self-comforting (presumably needed because females are supposed to be emotionally fragile and vulnerable), and women are also thought to prefer sweet wines and syrupy pre-mixed alcoholic drinks when indulging in alcohol. After indulging in all this sickly-sweet stodge, stereotypical women overcompensate in a bout of regret, self-recrimination and borderline-anorexic dieting by eating nothing but dry salads, because they are also obsessed with their weight and physical appearance. Eating a sensible, balanced, healthy diet does not seem to be on the agenda for either gender, because a real man would not be seen dead eating a salad, or a quiche. Manly foods are barbecued meat (full of fat, salt and carcinogenic chemicals from high-temeperature cooking), cancer-causing processed meats such as sausages and bacon, and savoury fast foods, and men's preference in alcoholic drinks includes beer or dry wines, nothing sweet. Books about how to feed men and boys and cookbooks aimed exclusively to men have become new genres, and can often be found for sale at Australia Post shops:

Man food by Billy Law (with a book cover design of a photo of woven and cooked bacon)Mad Hungry: Feeding Men and Boys by Lucinda Scala Quinn

Manly Food by Simon Cave "Because men order steak and women order salad!"

Tea-rooms and restaurants

At a budget terminal at an Australian domestic airport I recently came across a licenced restaurant that had a name and decor with a clearly manly theme, with posters depicting muscle-bound male workers in various occupational groups. They offered a range of beers. Maybe this marketing was aimed at male FIFO workers? Let's hope this silly crap disappears now that the Aussie mining has gone bust.

Another even more gender segregated phenomenon in the Australian hospitality industry is the high tea trend, in which tea and decoratively-presented bite-sized cakes and sandwiches are served on tiered cake stands. The servings are sweet, intricate, miniscule and pretty, engaging multiple feminine gender stereotypes at once: sugar-preference, diet-obsession, daintiness and prettiness-preference (I defy you to say that out loud without lisping).

High teas are often explicitly promoted as for females "get the girls together". Many hotels offer high tea sessions, but there are also entire tea-rooms that do nothing but high teas, and are typically decorated to saturation-point with old-fashioned, flowery and decorative low-brow ornaments, pictures and lighting. Women-only gatherings are the norm in such places. I recently attended a women-only birthday party at such a place. I thought it was quite sad that males had been excluded from this celebration, expecially in light of the fact that the "birthday girl" had a husband and only sons.

Community health centres, counselling and health advocacy services
Examples:Mensline (telephone counselling service)MensTime (relationship counselling, group programs and seminars, run by Anglicare, funded by a state govt. dept.)
Women's Health Victoria (advocacy)
Logan Women's Health and Wellbeing Centre
Women's HealthworksMenslink (afree counselling and mentoring the service for young men and their families in Canberra, promoted by Prime Minister Gillard's partner Tim Mathieson)
The idea of health service centres specifically for women is widespread and long-established. These places may offer support groups, counselling, gynaecological and/or educational services for women delivered by a women only staff.
Services promoted as “men’s health” appear to have more of an emphasis on counselling, psychology and recreational activities, and there appears to be more businesses advertised as men’s health services. Men’s and women’s health services may be government or charity funded.

Social and informal social support organizations
Some examples:Dads only playgroups Freemasons
Red Hat Society
CWA
Mens’ Sheds – an organization that is rapidly growing and being allocated a lot of government funding in Australia, and enjoys the patronage of the Prime Minister’s partner (a man).
The Women’s Connection
Asperger Women Associationsingle-sex choirs - appear to be popular despite not sounding as good as mixed choirs

Popular Websites
An example:Mamamia - a popular Australian website aimed at women, full of the kind of stuff that women stereotypically are thought to be interested in, such as celebrities, human interest stories, parenting stories, fashion, food and lots of adverts.

Contributing to the Wikipedia internet encyclopaedia
91% of Wikipedia editors are male according to a 2013 article in New Scientist magazine. The world's most famous online crowd-sourced encyclopedia is primarily a man's world.

Service clubs and business networking organizations
There are many regional and larger networking organizations specifically for businesswomen.

Many service clubs have a male-only membership past that has been modernized in past decades to allow women to become members of the organization as a whole or members of individual branches. Men’s and women’s only branches can be found in some service clubs and societies. The YWCA and YMCA are obvious examples of service organizations that have at least started with a single-sex focus.

General informal socializing (including private parties)
Parties for adults in Australia in the 1960s and 1970s have been described as strictly gender segregated by many social commentators, to the extent that the notion of parties where the men gather at one end of the room and the womenfolk cluster at the other end has become a cliche. It was noted that this was not limited to any particular strata of society - it has been observed among the privileged and the working class. Most definitely attitudes did improve in Australia during the latter parts of the 20th century, but I can report encountering some negativity from some older women during the 1990s in Australia as a result of me talking with their husbands as we all sat around a campfire during some off-road travelling. Their reaction seemed to echo an experience recounted in an interesting article about the controversial Australian movie Wake in Fright: "At one party, I remember my wife, who plays Janette Hynes, got tired of talking about hats and recipes and so decided to wander over towards the men’s circle. Later, she said to me, “I was greeted like I was a harlot, so I immediately scurried back to the women and the women were furious and thought I was trying to steal their men!” I recommend that movie as a striking depiction of gender segregation in socialising in Australia in the 1960s. Men who dared to stray to chat with the women at Australian parties in the past were apparently paradoxically regarded as a bit gay. I'm really not sure what the present situation is, as I don't go to a lot of parties. Sex segregation at parties is definitely one Australian tradition that is not worth resurrecting!

The kinds of social work/counselling organizations in Australia that provide single-gender health services and counselling services have also been known to host or sponsor "Dads' Only Days" or free family fun activity days specifically for children accompanied by their fathers or father-figures. I am not sure what these woman-free events are supposed to achieve in the community.

Consumer products marketed to one gender for no obvious or compelling reason
Some examples:Cottee's Fruit Cup cordial in different versions for boys and for girls

Bioglan Kids Gummies Multivitamin for Boys for "your little racer" with Disney animated cars on the packaginghttp://www.bioglan.com.au/common-needs/kids-health/bioglan-kids-gummies-multivitamin-for-boys.htmlScrap books as required in primary school booklists purchased from a Coles store in January 2016, identical in every way but for the colourful covers that come in two gender-stereotyped designs, with bluish colours and mechanical stuff for some kids and pinky hues and nature for others:

Man-New energy drink, seems to be marketed to blokes, possibly capitalizing on the current body-building fad among young men.

Bic Cristal For Her pens ballpoint pens in pretty colours marketed to the female consumer seen at Officeworks.

Disposable Shavers marketed in very highly gendered packaging with different names and colours, but how different could the shavers be? Guess which gender of cheap disposable shavers is the cheapest?Red Balloon "his and hers" leisure activity gift voucher packages - the men's pack includes activities to do with beer, action, sport and the outdoors, and the women's pack includes wine, relaxation and classes for learning how to make food or drink (cookery and barista classes), because after all that work as a kitchen slave a woman needs a bit of relaxation and a glass of wine.

Dietary supplements, vitamins, pills and potions
These products can be associated with bodybuilding and gym cultures and also appear to be popular sellers in pharmacies and have retailers solely devoted to these types of products, which are often marketed by gender. Is there any scientific justification for gender specialization in these products? Do any of these products have a scientific basis?

Magazines and magazine racks
The magazine industry has been creating products aimed at specific genders forever, and it is not surprising that the retail displays created to sell these products are often similarly gender-segregated. Magazine displays in virtually all newsagents and also some supermarkets are or have been gender segregated according to gender stereotypes that apply to the subject area of magazines, with “women’s magazines”, fashion, slimming, cooking, parenting and celebrity gossip mags displayed on the female side, and business, science, computers, motor vehicle, fishing, fitness, smut and current affairs mags are often shelved on the male side of the rack.

Books and Book Retailing Displays
A similar situation exists with books as in magazines - as the products are often aimed at one gender or age group, so the retail displays often group the products in a similar categorization. Book shelves in the David Jones department store as seen in 2013 are just one example - sex stereotype segregation in much the same manner as the typical newsagent shop’s display of magazines, with sport books, humour and biographies of males on one side, cookery, slimming and biographies of women on the other side. Even Australia Post circa 2016 has been observed to practice gendered marketing of books and gifts, with clearly segregated men's and women's shelves in post office retail spaces.

Books
Some examples:Womens’ Stuff by Kaz Cooke
The Dangerous Book for Boys by Conn and Hal Iggulden
The Daring Book for Girls by Andrea J. Buchanan and Miriam Peskowitz

Some fictional genres are thought to have a readership of predominantly one gender, for example “chick lit”.

Book authors
A quote from page 53 of the paperback edition of the 2011 book Spoilt Rotten! by Theodore Dalrymple:
"Yet I had never seen books classified in this way before, and the novelty of the arrangement surely tells us something about our present Zeitgeist, as does the classification of books by the race, sex or sexual practices of their authors."

Entertainment
The free-to-air TV channel 7Mate is marketed explicitly to men and the programming of the GEM TV channel is designed to appeal to a female audience.

Movie genres
Some genres seem to be created with only one gender in mind, such as romantic comedy and action movies. Every Hollywood action movie includes at least one stripper scene, by law.

Shelving in public libraries
I have seen magazines for loan arranged with a section for "Women's Interest" magazines.

Parenting adviceRelationships Australia, a counselling organization that is largely funded by government, advertised workshops about parenting girls for Dads and workshops about parenting boys for Mums, presumably based on the presumption that female parents need special help in understanding their male offspring, and vice versa.

Parenting Ideas parenting advice fact-sheets from Michael Grose Presentations Pty Ltd that are distributed free to parents through many Australian schools sometimes have a single-sex theme, one example being a sheet of advice about raising teenage daughters that had an emphasis on enforcing moral values and standards of behaviour that was reminiscent of thinking from the 1950s "It is important that we open up conversations around values and beliefs." " Encourage her to know who she is and keep to her values." "Is she living in a way that respects her core values?"

Books or advice about raising kids of one gender generally originate from a person of that same gender, for example:
Dannielle Miller is promoted as a parenting expert who specializes in the area of raising girls and her book The Butterfly Effect is about raising teen girls. The area of books of advice about parenting teens seems to be particularly affected by division by gender.

The popular but evidence-free book Raising Boys was written by Steve Biddulph, who was voted Australian Father of the Year in 2000 for his work encouraging the active role of fathers, a job surely only fit for a man.

A gender division can even be found in specialized areas of parenting advice:

Asperger’s in Pink by Julie Clark and Rudy Simone is just one of many recent books on the subject of Asperger syndrome and the autistic spectrum and girls, an area characterized by much speculation by people regarded as Asperger syndrome experts but supported by little scientific research

Beliefs about Parenting
The idea that the genders have important psychological differences is an element supporting the popular belief that children need parental role models of both genders (or a good non-parental substitute), especially a parental role model of their own gender. This popular belief inevitably leads to beliefs that sole parent mothers are insufficient to parents sons and vice versa, that single parents are insufficient as parents, that same-sex parents are jointly insufficient as parents, and that children from such families are in some way psychologically impaired or damaged, especially ones who were raised without a parent of their gender. Such beliefs go against the actual scientific evidence gathered from research. A great many individuals and families are condemned by this inter-connected set of beliefs about psychology and gender. There is rarely any acknowledgement that single-parent families are often living in poverty, and this stressful economic situation is rarely cited as a possible cause of social problems that are thought to be common to this type of family.

This web page from the single-gender service charity Menslink appears to be based some of the above negative beliefs about sole-parent families: http://menslink.org.au/news/

Events – organizational and informalReclaim the Night (men are reputedly banned from these marches)Movember (Women are not encouraged to grow a moustache to help raise awareness of men’s health issues, although heaven knows, many of us could.)
Hen’s nights
Buck’s parties
International Women’s Day
International Men’s Day

Mental illness - professional diagnosis and also self-diagnosis
In Australia there is a popular belief that in men depression can manifest not as a sad or low mood, but as aggression or irritability, thus widening the criteria for this mental illness to include countless extra men and distorting the definition of depression to the point of absurdity. This belief also gives agressive or violent men a handy excuse for bad behaviour. It is unclear whether irritable or aggressive women are supposed fall into any diagnostic category. Borderline personality disorder perhaps? BPD is a mental illness/personality disorder in which most of those diagnosed are women. Uneven gender ratios are a common feature of psychiatric diagnostic categories, and this has been the cause of much debate, with some alleging an influence of gender stereotyping.

A fine example of the use of gender-stereotyped marketing of mental health/psychiatry services in Australia would be the Man Therapy website from the Beyond Blue Australian psychiatry public awareness charity: http://www.mantherapy.org.au/
Is it even proper or appropriate for psychiatry to be aggressively marketed to the general population, with or without the aid of gender stereotyping?Crime and social deviance
Outlaw bikie clubs appear to have a male-only membership.

Research studies
Example:Health in Men Air Quality Study by researchers from the University of WA, Edith Cowan University, CSIRO and WA Centre for Health and Ageing.

Female and child subjects have routinely been excluded from medical research studies, for various reasons, limiting the applicability of the research findings. There are good reasons why some research studies only have subjects of one sex, but for others the reasons are far from clear.

Colours, toys and fashion
Baby boys are dressed in baby blue and baby girls in pink, but the colour-coding of humanity certainly doesn't stop there. In the last 10 years or so there has been a trend in which an overwhelming proportion of girls' clothing is coloured in the stereotypical girly colours of pink, magenta, salmon, mauve and purple, and this trend of gender segregation in clothing colours extends less obviously to boys, whose clothing range in department stores is predominantly in a range of colours that aren't those above, including black and dark colours. The Barbie-doll pink fad has now extended into women's wear, with hues in women's fashion that would have been unusual years ago becoming the mode, colours such as bright salmon and hot pink. Menswear has always been produced in a quite limited and sombre range of colours, and I don't think this has changed much in a long time.

Gendered colours are not limited to clothing, school bags, kids' lunch-boxes or fashion. Any toy section in a variety retail store in Australia will have it's pink aisles full of female and baby dolls, and other aisles full of action-fantasy play toys and moving vehicle toys in which colours such as black, blue, green and browns that are not pretty predominate. The concept of boys' and girls' toys is an established and pervasive part of our culture. For as long as I can remember the McDonalds fast-food chain has been categorizing the free toys given away with children's meals by gender, and your child will be allocated a toy by gender automatically by the staff, unless you object. While explicit labeling of toys as "GIRLS TOYS" and "BOYS TOYS" has been sighted at a Woolworths supermarket in May 2013, such explicit gendered signposting is usually not necessary in the toy departments of discount and department shops because the packaging of gender-specific products make the gender designation very clear, and such toys are usually grouped together by merchandising staff by gender. Explicit labeling of toys by gender appears to be a fairly common practice in the UK, one egregious example being the categorization of a chemistry set as a boy's toy by the Tesco supermarket chain: http://www.tesco.com/direct/action-science-chemistry-set/211-6172.prd
Fortunately, there are also forces acting against such sexism in the UK. In April 2013 a British pharmacy chain Boots was forced to change a policy of explicit gender labeling of toys after negative feedback from the public through social media: http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2013/apr/30/boots-removes-gender-signs-toys The United Kingdom-based Let Toys be Toys campaign objects to the promotion of books and toys as suitable for boys or girls. Concerned Australian parents have formed the campaign Play Unlimited with the aim of ending the segregation of toys along gender lines and promoting the idea that all children should be encouraged to enjoy the widest possible range of play experiences.

Australian politics has for a number of years, especially during the dismal age of Gillard/Abbott leadership in Australian federal politics, displayed a preoccupation with gender segregation and gender roles. The male Liberal Party leader Tony Abbott taking every opportunity to be photographed participating in masculine sports, often wearing minimal clothing, or playing at working in male-stereotyped trade occupations while doing tours of workplaces. Prime Minister Julia Gillard was hailed as a role-model of a working, high-achieving woman from the moment that she stole Kevin Rudd's job, and she has often taken the opportunity to be photographed in the midst of groups of women.

There is nothing new or uniquely Australian about gender segregation being embraced (and not condemned) by politicians and political campaigners. A news report in 2011 described Michelle Obama, the "First Lady" and wife of the President of the USA, being greeted very warmly by an audience of schoolgirls. On the right-wing/Republican side of US politics, Ann Romney was seen at a Republican Party convention in 2012 speaking in front of an audience in which many women waved identical placards with the message "Women Love Ann". Mrs Romney gave a speech about "love" and her marriage to male Mormon politician Mitt Romney which was all very touchy-feely, a stark demonstration of contrasting gender roles.

Activism
Disappointingly, sometimes the choice of the causes that Australians appear to care about appear to be heavily influenced by their sex or by their adherence to gender stereotypes. Animal welfare and environmental activism appears to be "women's work" while campaigners against immigration and far right political activist groups appear to be mostly male, while a great many other humanitarian or political causes attract a balanced gender ratio. In my personal opinion, I believe a balanced gender ratio goes along with a mentally balanced outlook in activism. Below are links to some Australian news stories showing implicitly or explicitly the influence of gender on activism:

The very wealthy and famous female African-American former TV chat show host Oprah Winfrey funded a school in South Africa for girls, the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls. This seems fitting because Oprah's success in business and the world of entertainment has been based on appealing to a predominantly female audience with a daytime TV show that dealt with stereotypically feminine topics from a stereotypically feminine viewpoint.

The Priceline Sisterhood appears to be one of those charity projects done by a retailer as positive PR. It also appears to be marketed to women and promoted as benefiting women through supporting health charities that address issues that have apparently been identified by Australian women as top concerns. Priceline is a cosmetics retailer and the website of this project is bright pink. Shopfronts and interiors of Priceline stores have been decorated in vivid Barbie-doll pink, just in case any consumers were unaware that these are shops for females. Unfortunately, many Priceline stores are also dispensing pharmacies, in some cases the only outlet for medical prescriptions in a shopping centre. This means that men who need to get a prescription filled would presumably be forced to walk into a shop aggressively decorated in a girly-woman theme in order to get their essential medical needs met, an experience that could make men feel that taking medications and looking after their own health needs is an unmanly thing to be doing. Relevant link:http://www.advancevisual.com.au/portfolio.aspx